Cruelty Culture Infects the Olympics

Whatever you think about how to best regulate women's sports, the treatment of Imane Khelif was despicable.

Algerian boxer Imane Khelif won a gold medal at the Paris Olympics, and she should be celebrating. Instead, she’s filing a legal complaint in response to the avalanche of harassment and hate she’s received.

Khelif came under brutal public scrutiny after a swift victory in an earlier match raised questions about her gender, which were only compounded by the fact that she has female sex organs, was identified as a girl at birth, and has been raised as female her entire life, but later discovered she is intersex and has XY chromosomes. Her story was quickly exploited by people who feel very strongly that transgender women should not be allowed to compete in women’s sports. Khelif isn’t transgender. But her very existence makes clear that Mother Nature does not actually draw a 100% clear binary between male and female. And that does have very real implications for competitive sports, most of which rely on that binary to keep competitions fair — and at the top levels, tightly regulate any tiny potentially unfair advantage.

This concern about “fairness” has been the pretext for the vast and ugly attacks on Khelif.

I am very far from an expert on sports, hormones, human development, chromosomes, intersex conditions, and the array of other areas that seem relevant to deciding where to draw the boundaries of womanhood for the purposes of competitive sports. That this issue is caught up in broader hostilities toward and cultural debates about transgender people doesn’t help to provide the kind of apolitical clarity necessary to make bright-line rules about human bodies that do not cleanly fall on either side of a hard line. There is plenty of room to debate just how eligibility should be determined for various sports, and as our scientific understanding of the human body improves, the rules around sports competitions will inevitably shift as well.

But aside from a tiny handful of examples, most of what I’ve seen isn’t good-faith debate. Instead, much of it has been ugly, bigoted, hateful, and intentionally cruel. It’s been calling Khelif “he” and a “man.” It’s been reveling in dehumanization and total callousness — treating Khelif as some sort of object or symbol, not as a human being for whom global attention to one’s genitals and chromosomes and appearance is surely profoundly humiliating. There are, of course, some people who really are invested in women’s sports and rights and want to dig into how to best balance the reality of gender and sex diversity with competitions that rely on gender binaries. But there are a lot of other people who have taken up the mantle of protecting women’s sports in order to engage in the ritual degradation of a person whose body does not perfectly conform with what seem to be ever-changing definitions of what a woman is. The point seems less about defending women’s sports and more about treating Khelif as some sort of freakshow. It is one of the ugliest spectacles I have witnessed in a long time.

It’s also been enlightening.